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Program news

We hope that everyone is well. We want to share some updates that occurred in the eBay Developers Program over the last quarter.

Exciting new APIs and capabilities discussed at eBay Connect 2021

Third-party developers from around the globe came together virtually with eBay executives and technology leaders on June 14 and July 12 to experience eBay Connect 2021. This fifth annual installment of the conference featured a full slate of webinars discussing eBay’s latest APIs and capabilities, including a new Media API that enables US, UK and Motors sellers to add videos to their listings, a brand new Notifications platform and enhanced Notification API, and exciting enhancements to the Sell Marketing API including seller-designed coded coupons and Advanced Promoted Listings.

Other highlights of the webinars included:

  • An update on eBay’s progress with managed payments
  • Updates to Buy APIs, including the Browse and Feed APIs expanding to new marketplaces, a new items widget for the Browse API, and a new version of the Order API, which has full support for eBay managed payments and a new Checkout with eBay widget that allows for seamless checkouts
  • Changes to EU VAT, including EU’s new requirements for marketplaces to collect VAT for certain orders/tax scenarios
  • Preview of Terapeak Research APIs

Tanya Vlahovic, Head of Developer Ecosystem and Lead Architect for Public APIs was the host for the webinars, and the speakers at these events included the following eBay executives:

  • Jamie Iannone, President and Chief Executive Officer
  • Mazen Rawashdeh, Chief Technology Officer
  • Mohan Patt, VP, Buyer Experience
  • Randy Shoup, Chief Architect and VP of Engineering Ecosystem and Experience
  • Scot Hamilton, VP of Engineering, Seller Experience
  • Erik Selberg, VP, Shipping and Member Communications
  • Alex Kazim, VP, GM of Global Advertising
  • Shan Vosseller, VP of Product, Payments

In case you missed any of the sessions, you can access all of the presentations and video recordings from the eBay Connect 2021 page.

New capability to add videos to listings

With the release of the new Media API in late April, sellers are now able to add videos to their listings. To add a video to a listing, the video must be uploaded using the new Media API, and to associate the video to an active listing, the Trading API, Inventory API, or LMS must be used.

Currently, videos in listings can only be played back on mobile apps in the US (including eBay Motors) and UK, but stay tuned for more video capabilities to come.

Notification API release to support application subscriptions

The new methods in Notification API will allow our partners to browse topics, create and manage destinations, create and manage subscriptions, and includes an ability to test the subscriptions. The release is backed by AsyncAPI specification-based contracts for defining the message payloads for each topic, and multi-stack, comprehensive SDK support. Integrity of the payloads are guaranteed through ECC signature header.

This Platform comes with a simplified integration model that makes it easy to onboard new use cases.

Two critical topics MARKETPLACE_ACCOUNT_DELETION and AUTHORIZATION_REVOCATION have already gone live, and others topics are being onboarded for Q3 release.

New Order API fully supports managed payments

New version of the Order API was released in early June, and this new version supports managed payments and integration with the Checkout with eBay widget. Developers using the new API must also integrate with the new eBay widget. With the new widget, checkout is fully managed by eBay.

eBay Marketplace Account Deletion notifications update

The following updates were made to eBay marketplace account deletion notifications:

  • All endpoints will go through a validation process prior to being registered. For this validation, the endpoint needs to be up and able to respond successfully to a challenge scenario.
  • For any developer application that is not persisting any eBay data, there is now an option to opt out of eBay marketplace account deletion/closure notifications. However, developers should be aware that failure to provide correct information may result in penalties or having their account disabled.

For more information on these updates, please see the eBay Marketplace Account Deletion/Closure Notifications Workflow page.

eBay managed payments update

eBay managed payments has rolled out globally to all eBay marketplaces, and we are on track to migrate the majority of sellers to the new experience this year. The getPaymentsProgramOnboarding method of the Account API can be used to retrieve the onboarding status of a seller, as well as any necessary steps that a seller still needs to take to get onboarded for managed payments. Any new sellers to eBay will automatically go through the managed payments onboarding process.

In addition to managed payments being available in all marketplaces, here are a few more things sellers should be aware of:

  • Any listings not set up correctly for managed payments will eventually be administratively ended in the second half of 2021
  • For sellers who are eligible to onboard to managed payments but have not migrated yet, their selling privileges will eventually get revoked in the H2 2021. When this happens, they will get a 120 Error - “You need to create a seller's account.” when they try to list using the Trading API, and they will need to go to My eBay to onboard for managed payments before they can list again
  • Managed payments sellers will no longer get monthly invoices from eBay, as all non-transactional fees will either get deducted from seller payouts or billed at time of transaction to the preferred payment method on file for managed payments. The getTransactions method of the Finances API is a good way to view all transactional and non-transactional fees.

Changes to VAT regulations for the UK and EU in 2021

As of July 1, 2021, eBay is now responsible for collecting VAT on goods sold to private customers in both the EU and UK (UK started Jan 1, 2021) when:

  • The goods have a value of up to GBP135 imported into the UK, or up to EUR150 imported into the EU
  • The goods are shipped from within the EU by non-EU sellers or within UK by non-UK sellers

There are also significant changes to cross-border supplies within the EU by EU sellers.

See this Seller Centre article for more information on the 2021 changes to VAT regulations.

eBay takes VAT compliance seriously. If eBay determines, or receives official information, that you are not meeting your VAT obligations, or if you provide incorrect information which does not permit eBay to collect VAT correctly in cases where eBay is obliged to collect VAT, your account may be blocked from selling, and your active listings removed. You will need to contact eBay before we can remove any selling restriction.

For more information on VAT in general, see the VAT Obligations in the EU help article.

New fields were added to the Fulfillment API and to the order management calls of the Trading API to support new EU VAT policies.

The new schema in the Fulfillment API includes:

The new schema in the Trading API includes:

RSS Feeds now available on developer portal

RSS feeds are now available for the API Status and API Deprecation Status pages.

API updates

The following updates have been made to public APIs over the last few months.

Sell Feed API now supports LMS and File Exchange feed types

A new inventory_task resource added to support LMS and File Exchange feed types. An LMS Migration Guide and a File Exchange Migration Guide were created in order to guide users from those two products to integrate with the Sell Feed API.

New fields added to Fulfillment API to provide information about eBay Fulfillment

The program.fulfillmentProgram container was added to getOrder/getOrders methods to indicate when an order is being handled by eBay Fulfillment. eBay Fulfillment is currently only available to sellers on the eBay Germany and UK marketplaces.

Listing APIs support Certified Refurbished item condition

A new CERTIFIED_REFURBISHED enum value was added to the ConditionEnum type for the Inventory API and Listing API. This new value replaces the MANUFACTURER_REFURBISHED value.

Finances API updates

The following updates were made to the Finances API:

  • A new marketplaceFees.feeMemo field was added to the getTransactions method to provide more details about any fees that are deducted from the seller’s payout
  • New payouts.bankReference and payouts.payoutMemo output fields added to the getPayout and getPayouts methods.

Browse API updates

The following updates were made to the Browse API:

Buy Feed API updates

The following updates were made to the Buy Feed API:

getRateTables of Account API now supports more countries

The getRateTables method of the Account API now supports the Germany, UK, Spain, and France eBay marketplaces.

Deprecations and Decommission updates

The following APIs/methods have recently been announced as deprecated. Please see the Deprecation Status page for detailed information.

  • Business Policies Management API. This API will be decommissioned on January 31, 2022

The following APIs/methods have recently been decommissioned:

  • All Selling Manager methods in Trading API.
  • The IncludeRecommendations request boolean field and the ListingRecommendations container returned in the responses of Add/Revise/Relist/Verify Trading API methods.
  • The three Promotional Sale methods in Trading API. eBay recommends that sellers use the Sell Marketing API instead, which provides all Promotions Manager and Promoted Listing capabilities.
  • The X-EBAY-API-APP-ID HTTP header and the appid query parameter are no longer supported for Shopping API calls. Instead, users must pass in OAuth token values through the X-EBAY-API-IAF-TOKEN HTTP header.

We hope everyone had a great first half of 2021, and we are looking forward to working with the community throughout the rest of the year!